The Butterfly Clues (7 page)

Not only am I surrounded on all fronts by prom flyers, I’m also surrounded by Jeremy. He makes sure to grab a seat next to me in English class on Monday and, after lunch on Tuesday passes me a note, messily folded. I unfold it in the bathroom, in private. It says:
Study? Tonight?
I throw it out, then feel bad and have to dig for it in the trash, underneath balled-up paper towels and used-up lip-gloss containers.

By Wednesday, I can’t wait any longer. I can’t get my mind off of Sapphire or Flynt, the boy who called me pretty. I’m aching to scratch the growing itch of all of the details I’ve yet to discover about their secret sunken city. Instead of taking the bus to school, I hop the 96—
a good number, thirty-two threes—
and ride to the end of the line. I never used to dream of cutting school, as awful as it could be—I was too scared. But, suddenly, I understand: fearlessness comes when you realize there are more important things to solve than vocab questions and limits. I find my way back to the Dumpsters, hoping to find Flynt scavenging as promised.

Instead, I find three notes taped, one on top of the other, to the Dumpster closest to the street. Scrawled in mad, loopy script, barely legible, each one (with minor variations) says the same thing. The last one reads:

Dearest Lo,

If I’m not here, it’s because I’ve been called by darker forces to a place known, in the hush-hush, as Malatesta’s. Walk due north two blocks and make a left down the alleyway marked with
X
s in red paint. Be stealthy. Be brave.

x Flynt

My heart flutters; he’s left me a note. Every day since we hung out. I follow his instructions—the whole time worrying that he won’t be where he says he is, or that I’ll get too lost to find him, or that this will turn out to be a joke or a prank.

Luckily, I spot the alleyway Flynt described in his note—subtle red markings, graffiti skulls, forming an ominous border around cement walls.

Farther down the alleyway is a clearing, and within it, a large lean-to, a huge M whose entrance is painted in drippy black.
Tap tap tap, banana
, again,
tap tap tap, banana
, and again,
tap tap tap, banana
, to be extra safe
.
I step cautiously inside. There are several tables and chairs, obviously Dumpster-scavenged, scattered unevenly throughout the space. People—pierced, tattooed, Mohawked—are seated or sprawled on the dirty floor, working on various art projects.

I find Flynt squatting in a corner, painting on a giant wooden board with his hands and elbows, his face furrowed in intense concentration. Every visible part of his body is covered in paint.

“Flynt?”

No one looks up.

“Flynt,” I say, louder this time.

A girl sitting close to him leans over and blows on his ear. She has studded emeralds pierced into her cheeks.

“Hey, F,” she says, “you’ve got a visitor.”

He looks up and grins at me, bear ears standing at attention. I think there might be paint on his teeth. His eyes are fiercely green right now, cheeks flushed.

“Lo! You found me!” He gets up, wiping his hands on his patched jacket. “Give me a second to pack this stuff away. Then I’m gonna show you all around the mystical world of Neverland.”

He stoops to lift the heavy board, simultaneously making introductions: “Lo, meet Seraphina—she makes killer wigs, and a million other things it would take too long to name”—the girl with pierced cheeks nods to me—“Marlow, resident puppet maker, poet, revolutionary”—a skinny black guy in rainbow suspenders with a half-shaved head looks up, confused—“and Gretchen, vegan chef, dancer, and illustrator extraordinaire”—a very tall girl in a tutu wide as a hoopskirt and heavy black lace-up boots curtsies to me. “These three pretty much run the place.”

I wrap my coat around my (now) holey cashmere sweater— something Mom bought me in seventh grade from the Gap—and wave shyly at them. I’ve never been good at art, at turning the inside-out. Oren was the artist—the illustrator, the rhyme-maker, with a voice like maple syrup.

Flynt turns the wide board in his hands, yells over his shoulder as he travels: “I’ll be right back.”

He disappears behind a curtain. I count nine dislocated wooden planks in the ceiling of the old warehouse; the calm perfection of the number wraps itself around me like a second coat. It’s going to be a good day—I can really let myself believe it now. Seraphina, Marlow, and Gretchen go back to their projects. Flynt reemerges seconds later, sans wood, but paint-smattered as ever. “Let’s go.”

He offers me his arm. And this time, I take it.

“So, I just … throw it?” I lift a chair between my legs, preparing to shoot it into the pyramid of trash cans Flynt has set up in an abandoned parking lot. Flynt is teaching me how to “trash can bowl”—a common game here in Neverland, apparently. I’ve never bowled with anything but duck pins in a big air-conditioned room at the birthday parties my mom forced me to attend as a kid.

“Yep. Just chuck it, hard as you can. But, you’ve gotta get a feel for the chair, aim it with just the right angle.” He swoops his hands and arms through the air in demonstration. “It’s beautiful, if you do it right.” He smiles coyly. “No pressure, though.”

Just as I’m about to send the chair flying, a car backfires somewhere, and the noise makes me jump—still nervous, still twitchy from the memory of the gunshot.

My chair flies sideways in the air and splinters into several pieces as it hits the ground, three feet away from the perfectly pyramidal arrangement of trash cans. A half second later, Flynt, with a running jump, propels his body into the trash cans. They land with a tremendous clattering, and he leaps to his feet and jogs back toward me.

“Whoa! Lo! You got them all! Look at that!” He grabs me by my waist, spins me around, and cheers, trying to get me to do the same. My body feels like jelly, loose and uncontrolled, and I wriggle myself from Flynt’s hold as quickly as I can. I stare down at the arms of my coat and realize they’re covered in paint. Flynt’s multicolored handprints—the paint he was using at Malatesta’s must have been still-wet on his hands. I can trace the places where he’s touched me—shoulders, waist, the backs of my hands. And I can’t help but smile, hoping Flynt doesn’t see how violet my ears must be turning.

“I broke the chair. I’m no good at this.”

“Then how did all of those trash cans end up on the ground? Answer me that, Lo!” He quickly runs toward the Dumpsters and returns with a new chair. “And if you broke the chair, then why is it perfectly intact?” A smile spreads across his face. “Hey. What happened to your coat?”

I look up at him. His eyes are flecked with gold. I play mock-innocent. “What do you mean? It’s always looked like this, Flynt.”

“Right, right, of course. Sorry—the sun is so bright—makes me see things.”

“Stop trying to distract me from my winning streak.” I narrow my eyes, set my mouth into a line, and bend my knees and arms into a fighting stance. “Set those trash cans up. I’m gonna knock ’em down again.”

Flynt sets them up for me. I raise the new chair over my head—a slim cherry oak missing a leg—close my eyes, and fling it ahead. A wild crashing—a tumbling explosion—makes my eyes pop open. I did it.

“Score!” Flynt cries dramatically, arms raised to the heavens.

There’s a wind picking up, making my bangs blow off of my forehead, making the trash cans spin against the gravel, a dragging sort of beat. We skip to it in looping circles, hand in hand. And then I realize that our hands are touching and let his go and run to the other side of the parking lot to set up the cans for him. He knocks them down cleanly, easily, and we dance around some more—two people, victorious. Laughing.

Being with Flynt is strangely freeing. He’s different from everyone else I’ve ever met. Which makes me feel less completely and totally abnormal, less alien. I just didn’t know before that another person, let alone a boy, could make me feel this way.

I barely know anything about him, but he seems so familiar— as though I could flip through childhood photo albums and he’d be in every picture. Grinning. Swinging one-armed from trees in summer. Making three-armed snowmen in winter.

“All right,” he says, pulling some red mittens from the pockets of his coat. Paper scraps and pen caps and a small plastic blue owl tumble out with them. “What say you we move on to the next part of our tour?”

I nod. Flynt grabs the chair we’ve been chucking and returns it to its resting place, near the Dumpster, for the next trash can bowlers to use.

I have a sudden aching wish, lodged in the pit of my stomach, for Oren to be here right now. He would have gone crazy for this, he would have come up with some way to give the game stakes, to make it more competitive, he always did; he would have won; we would have had to give him back-scratches whenever he wanted them for two weeks. I wonder if he ever went trash can bowling, when he left, before he left for good.

The piece of paper I always keep in my shoe slides backward from my arch, burning itself into my heel.

That’s when I feel it: the
urge
, swelling in me like air being pumped into a balloon. I try to deflate it so Flynt won’t see—push with my hands against my head to hold it in, but I can’t. It’s too powerful; it hurts; it pushes back until my hands fly from my forehead and I walk toward the fallen trash cans, touch each of them—six—in case Oren ever touched them too. Six trash cans. Maybe I’ll inherit his cells, take them into my cells, and maybe some part of him will grow back there. Six chances. Three breaths at each can. Six chances for him to come back. Eighteen breaths. Eighteen chances to breathe him in.

Flynt hollers to get my attention. I’ve been standing in one spot, lost inside my head, and he’s yards and yards ahead of me now. I run ahead to him and he leads me on, farther into Neverland, the city of lost children.

“And this is where the junkies go to buy heroin, and the corner across the street is where the cokeheads go to buy cocaine, and this one over here is where they’ll sell you meth, if you’re really desperate,” Flynt explains. “It’s all very organized around here.”

Everything he tells me about the workings of Neverland makes me feel very small and young. The worst thing that ever happens in high school world is when people get caught at the mall cutting class, or smoking cigarettes behind the science labs—nothing could possibly be worse than detention, than being grounded and not allowed to go to one of Sarah Moreland’s infamous hook-up parties. No one thinks outside of the Carver bubble—how much worse things could get, or how much better.

Flynt steers me farther down the desolate-looking street. The few buildings still standing are window-cracked and look as though at some point they have all sustained major structural damage by fire.

Neverland is spread out like a dysfunctional maze where nothing quite connects back to itself or makes sense. It seems like the whole place was laid out by a group of people who lost interest halfway through its construction: the church without a steeple; the rusted-out birdbath that acts as a kind of community P.O. Box where messages are dropped and exchanged; the empty lot full of sinks and toilets and cracked metal tubes and parts known as “the bathhouse.” Flynt explains it is a common Neverland hookup spot.

Half the people we meet are other runaways. They squat mid-sidewalk and part like the Red Sea to let us through, like Flynt is Moses. Some raise their fists to him as we pass, a motion of solidarity; some wolf-whistle at us, which makes him laugh, and then snort, which makes me laugh.

We turn a corner and head down an alleyway blocked by a heavy curtain. I put my right hand in my pocket,
tap tap tap, banana.
I
banana
the softest
banana
in the world; it’s a new game, seeing just how soft I can
banana
while still
banana-
ing.

And then I gasp. Beyond the curtain is a Narnia; it’s as though we’ve passed through to another, secret world. In it is a large, open space where someone has erected a series of random stone walls and stairs that lead nowhere. Everything is covered in brightly painted abstract murals and strung with twinkling lights and quilted bits of fabric. And there are people everywhere, in long skirts and patched black jackets with bolts in their ears and noses and lips and tongues, some with dreadlocks like Flynt’s, others with shaved heads or hair streaked with color.